Climate
Changing, U.S. Says in Report (06/03/02) newIn The New York Times by Andrew C. Revkin
In a stark shift for the Bush administration, the United States
has sent a climate report to the United Nations detailing specific and
far-reaching effects that it says global warming will inflict on the American
environment. In the report, the administration for the first time mostly
blames human actions for recent global warming. It says the main culprit
is the burning of fossil fuels that send heat-trapping greenhouse gases
into the atmosphere.

White
House defends U-turn on global warming (06/04/02) newIn The Washington Times by George Archibald
The White House yesterday defended the about-face on global warming
contained in its report to the United Nations on climate change. The report
marked the first Bush administration agreement with environmental activists
that recent global warming is caused by heat-trapping greenhouse gases
in the atmosphere from human use of fossil fuels.... White House spokesman
Scott McClellan yesterday defended the report, issued Friday by the Environmental
Protection Agency, by pointing to its language reiterating the administrations
stance that, Mr. McClellan said, there remains considerable uncertainty
in current understanding of how climate varies naturally. The administration
says such uncertainty backs its opposition to the Kyoto treatys
goal of cutting U.S. carbon dioxide emissions by 7 percent from their
1990 levels between 2008 to 2012.

Bush
burned by climate report (06/08/02) newBy Henry Lamb at WorldNetDaily
Despite a flurry of media reports to the contrary, the Bush administrations
policy on climate change has not flip-flopped. The media frenzy followed
the release of a U.S. Climate Assessment Report prepared for the U.N.
Framework Convention on Climate Change.... Most of the individuals who
prepared the report are holdovers from the Clinton-Gore era, who are known
proponents of the global-warming theory. It is also widely known that
some of Bushs high-level appointments are also proponents of the
theory, even though Bush, himself, has expressed strong reservations.
Release of the report was not intended to be an announcement of a change
in policy  it was simply compliance with treaty requirements.

Dont
tell Dubya (06/09/02) newBy Robert Novak in The Chicago Sun-Times
The Environmental Protection Agency report warning of global warming
dangers was issued without President Bushs being informed in advance,
even though it seemed to contradict his long-held position. Thats why
Bush dismissed what the EPA did as a report put out by the bureaucracy.
The president did not mention EPA Administrator Christine Todd Whitman,
the former governor of New Jersey who has frequently clashed with the
White House.

C.I.A.
Was Tracking Hijacker Months Earlier Than It Had Said (06/03/02) newIn The New York Times by David Johnston and Elizabeth
Becker
The officials said the C.I.A. learned in early 2001 that Khalid
al-Midhar, who died in the attack on the Pentagon, was linked to a suspect
in the bombing of the Navy destroyer Cole in October 2000. The agency
had said previously that it did not learn of Mr. Midhars connections
to Al Qaeda or his multiple visits to the United States until the month
before the hijackings, when an increase in chatter about terrorist
threats prompted a review of the C.I.A.s terrorism files.

Face
to Face With a Terrorist: Government Worker Recalls Mohamed Atta Seeking
Funds Before Sept. 11 (06/06/02) newBy Brian Ross at ABC News
Four of the hijackers who attacked America on Sept. 11 tried to
get government loans to finance their plots, including ringleader Mohamed
Atta, who sought $650,000 to modify a crop-duster, a government loan officer
[Johnelle Bryant] told ABCNEWS.... Atta also expressed an interest in
visiting New York, specifically the World Trade Center, and asked Bryant
about security there. He inquired about other American cities, including
Phoenix, Los Angeles, Seattle and Chicago. Prompted by a souvenir she
had on her desk, he also expressed interest in the Dallas Cowboys
football stadium, mentioning that the team was Americas team
and the stadium had a hole in the roof.

The
Other Shoe: Obsessing over Sept. 11 distracts us from preventing the next
attack. (06/07/02) newBy Peggy Noonan in The Wall Street Journal
At the same time the institutions that keep us up and humming, or
at least help keep us mutually invested in and respectful of each other
and our way of life, continue to wobble and groan from the weight of their
misconduct. The American Catholic Church is a victim of self-inflicted
wounds, its corruptions as towering as its cathedrals. Big business 
Enronned. Wall Street  stock tipped, finagled and fooled by a bubble.
Big accounting, by which we judge how our business investments are doing,
is a joke. The FBI and the CIA are more joke fodder. Our serious journalists
are focused on todays testimony, tonights game and the 2004
Democratic presidential primaries. The others do shark attacks and entertainment
awards. Our intellectuals are off on various toots, most of them either
irrelevant  the latest edition of the New York Review of Books leads
with stories on David Brock, Clarence Thomas, Sexy Puritans, Peggy Guggenheim
and Noel Coward  or all too relevant and wrong.

Wartime
Distractions (06/04/02) newBy John Podhoretz in The New York Post
The war did not end with the regime change in Afghanistan. Nor did
it end with the removal of the last girder from Ground Zero. Its
still ongoing. The CIA-FBI-Congress-media frenzy is the way the Washington
game was played before the war on terrorism. For a while, it seemed that
game had at last been retired in the wake of Sept. 11. It should have
been. But you could sense a kind of perverse relief on the part of the
media and governmental Establishment that the old game could still be
played.

A
Few Very Good Men: Priest Recruiter Bill Parent Is Looking for Those Who
Have Seen the Light (06/09/02) newIn The Washington Post by Phil McCombs
Whats most surprising, in talking with the seminarians and
young priests and new deacons-at the reception and later by phone-is that,
far from being discouraged by the scandals that have rocked the church,
they seem filled with new fervor, as McCarrick indicated. These are hard-charging
guys-tough, determined, full of life and good humor, a palpable sense
of joy. Most come from solid Catholic homes, had careers before they went
to seminary, and wanted success, cars, romance-all the stuff of modern
life. But something kept nagging, and although they ran and hid and wrestled
with demons and angels they knew deep down what it was.

Celibate
and Loving It: For Many Priests, True Happiness Lies in The Joining of
Self and Church (06/06/02) newIn The Washington Post by a Staff Writer
Part of the point of celibacy, for Catholics, is to confront people
with something bigger than biology, society, music, dancing, writing,
painting, advertising. And sex. Celibates also turn around the supposition
this life is a heroic renunciation. They say celibacy is not No. It is
Yes. Maybe. Anyway, it's not just a Catholic thing.

The
Body of Christ and the spring meeting of the U.S. Catholic bishops
(06/09/02) newBy Francis Cardinal George, OMI, in The Catholic New
World
A crisis of authority in the Church cannot be resolved if bishops
donít act like bishops. A bishop has responsibility before Christ for
keeping people united to Christ. A bishop therefore sets boundaries, in
the matter of sexual misconduct or any other matter; but, more fundamentally,
he encourages people to live virtuously in Christ. When people are ďin
ChristĒ and not full of themselves and their own lives, they are the Church.
Since the bishop is the visible point of reference for union with Christ,
people divorced from their bishop are not part of the apostolic Church.
Hence the terrible trial for the Church when priests and people and bishops
are not together in purpose and in life.

The
Bishops and the Vatican (06/10/02) newBy Avery Cardinal Dulles in The New York Times
The bishops are understandably concerned to show that they are taking
bold and decisive measures. But they should take care not to lock the
church into positions that will later prove to be unwise. If they yield
too much to the present atmosphere of panic, the Holy See can be relied
upon to safeguard the theological and canonical tradition. The many levels
of authority in the church are a precious resource.

Tearful
FBI Agent Apologizes To Sept. 11 Families and Victims (05/30/02)At Cybercast News Service by Jeff Johnson
In a memorandum written 91 days before the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks,
an FBI agent warned that Americans would die as a result of the bureaus
failure to adequately pursue investigations of terrorists living in the
country. FBI Special Agent Robert Wright, Jr., who wrote the memo, led
a four-year investigation into terrorist money laundering in the United
States. Wright began crying as he concluded his remarks at a Washington
press conference Thursday.

FBI
admits bureau missed clues of Sept. 11 attacks (05/30/02)In The Oklahoman by Ted Bridis of Associated Press
FBI Director Robert Mueller said Wednesday there may have been more
missed clues before the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. He also suggested
for the first time that investigators might have uncovered the plot if
they had been more diligent about pursuing leads. The jury is still
out on all of it, Mueller said, during a wideranging, two-hour presentation
at FBI headquarters. Looking at it right now, I cant say for
sure it would not have, that there wasnt a possibility that we could
have come across some lead that would have led us to the hijackers.

Stop
frisking crippled nuns (06/01/02)By Mark Steyn in The Spectator
So youíre at Newark standing in line behind a young Saudi male and
an 87-year-old arthritic nun from Des Moines. Whoíll be asked to remove
his or her shoes? Six out of ten times, itíll be the nun. Three out of
ten times, you. One out of ten, Abdumb al-Dumber. Even if this is just
for show, what itís showing is profound official faintheartedness.

Liberal
Reality Check (05/31/02)By Nicholas D. Kristof in The New York Times
One reason aggressive agents were restrained as they tried to go
after Zacarias Moussaoui is that liberals like myself  and the news
media caldron in which I toil and trouble  have regularly excoriated
law enforcement authorities for taking shortcuts and engaging in racial
profiling. As long as were pointing fingers, we should peer into
the mirror. The timidity of bureau headquarters is indefensible. But it
reflected not just myopic careerism but also an environment (that we who
care about civil liberties helped create) in which officials were afraid
of being assailed as insensitive storm troopers.

In
the mind of a would-be suicide bomber (05/30/02)In The Jerusalem Post by David Rudge
Underlying it all, however, were the teachings which preach the
need for jihad to create a just and equal, non-corrupt and non-criminal
society by the spread and unification of Islam. .... I also
began to imagine the people I would be killing, whether they would be
women and children, families sitting down at a cafe. I became a bit disillusioned,
because I had been told to blow myself up in any event, she said.
This meant to me that what was important for them was to succeed
in perpetrating an attack, whether there were casualties or not, and then
they would be able to pat themselves on the back. I felt like they were
playing a game with the blood of the martyrs.

Shin
Bet, IDF nab reluctant female suicide bombers (05/30/02)In Haaretz by Staff
25-year-old Tanzim activist from Jaba in the northern West Bank
was planning to carry out a suicide strike in Jerusalem. Hamamra told
reporters she had decided to go ahead with the attack for personal
reasons but wouldnt give further details.... She said after
she had completed the training, she had a change of heart and decided
not to go through with the plan. She said: I began to think about
killing people  babies, women, sick people, and to imagine my family
sitting in a restaurant and someone coming in and blowing them up.
Hamamra said she feared God would not see it as a good reason for
committing suicide and therefore would not accept me as a shaheed.

My
fellow Muslims, we must fight anti-Semitism (05/26/02)In Haaretz by Joseph Algazy
Ramadan, 39, is not only an outstanding Muslim intellectual but
also the grandson of the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, Hassan
Al-Bana, who was murdered in his own country in 1949. He firmly condemns
the anti-Semitic incidents that took place during the past year in France,
Belgium and other European countries, such as attacks on synagogues and
Jewish institutions. Too few Muslims have spoken out against these
anti-Semitic and Judeophobic phenomena, he says. In his opinion,
any attempt to afford legitimization to anti-Semitism on the basis of
texts taken from the Islamic tradition, and as an expression of protest
against the suffering of the Palestinians, must be firmly rejected.

The
Elderly Man and the Sea? Test Sanitizes Literary Texts (05/02/02)In The New York Times by N. R. Kleinfield
In a feat of literary sleuth work, Ms. Heifetz, the mother of a
high school senior and a weaver from Brooklyn, inspected 10 high school
English exams from the past three years and discovered that the vast majority
of the passages  drawn from the works of Isaac Bashevis Singer,
Anton Chekhov and William Maxwell, among others  had been sanitized
of virtually any reference to race, religion, ethnicity, sex, nudity,
alcohol, even the mildest profanity and just about anything that might
offend someone for some reason. Students had to write essays and answer
questions based on these doctored versions  versions that were clearly
marked as the work of the widely known authors.

Political
Diversity Lacking in Many UNC-CH Departments (May 2002)In Carolina Journal by Jon Sanders
A survey of faculty members in nine departments at the University
of North Carolina at Chapel Hill has found that more than four-fifths
are registered Democrats. The results of the survey, conducted by the
conservative student magazine Carolina Review for its March issue, called
into question UNC-CHs devotion to diversity. The results were not
unique; in 1996, The Daily Tar Heel examined eight departments and found
a similar disparity: 91 percent of professors who were registered with
a major political party were Democrats, while 9 percent were registered
Republicans.

The
unhyphenating of America: Census finds fewer citing European roots
(05/31/02)In The Boston Globe by Cindy Rodriquez and Bill Dedman
Four centuries after the Pilgrims reached Plymouth Rock, European-Americans
are cutting their ancestral roots. In the last decade, the number of Americans
who said they were English, Irish, or from another European derivation
dropped by at least 32 million, according to new Census 2000 data. Six
million more people than 10 years ago, about 20 million, listed their
ancestry as American or USA. And millions more
left it blank.

UN
Misses the Forest for the Trees (05/22/02)By Alex A. Avery of Hudson Institute
We suggest that the United Nations work to accelerate market reforms,
property rights protections, and the rule of law so that people in developing
nations can increase their standards of living. Moreover, the UN should
work much harder than it has in the past to increase the productivity
of farmers in developing countries.... It is just too bad that Greenpeace,
Friends of the Earth, the World Wildlife Fund, and the other groups that
are supposedly concerned about biodiversity continue to be distracted
by fights over fertilizers, pesticides, and biotechnology as the forest
burns around them.

Weakland
apologizes for his sinfulness (05/31/02)In The Journal-Sentinel by Staff
Former Milwaukee Archbishop Rembert Weakland apologized to his parishioners
tonight for the scandal that has occurred because of my sinfulness,
saying he felt remorse, shame, contrition and emptiness over
a relationship he had 20 years ago with a man and the archdioceses
subsequent $450,000 payment to silence him. Weakland also revealed that,
contrary to earlier statements, his income from honoria and writing projects
over his 25 years as archbishop did not cover the amount of the settlement.
In my remaining years, I will continue to contribute to the archdiocese
whatever I can, he said, and, of course, the archdiocese will
receive whatever effects I own on my death.

Text:
Weaklands apology (05/31/02)In The Journal-Sentinel
I come before you today to apologize and beg forgiveness. I know
 and I am sure you do too  that the Church to be authentic
must be a community that heals. But I also know  and you do too
 that there is no healing unless it is based on truth. In my remarks
I will do my best. I apologize to all the faithful of this Archdiocese
which I love so much, to all its people and clergy, for the scandal that
has occurred because of my sinfulness. Long ago, I placed that sinfulness
in Godís loving and forgiving heart, but now and into the future I worry
about those whose faith may be shaken by my acts.

The
End of History? (Summer 1989)By Francis Fukuyama in The National Interest
The triumph of the West, of the Western idea, is evident first of
all in the total exhaustion of viable systematic alternatives to Western
liberalism. In the past decade, there have been unmistakable changes in
the intellectual climate of the worlds two largest communist countries,
and the beginnings of significant reform movements in both. But this phenomenon
extends beyond high politics and it can be seen also in the ineluctable
spread of consumerist Western culture in such diverse contexts as the
peasants markets and color television sets now omnipresent throughout
China, the cooperative restaurants and clothing stores opened in the past
year in Moscow, the Beethoven piped into Japanese department stores, and
the rock music enjoyed alike in Prague, Rangoon, and Tehran. What we may
be witnessing is not just the end of the Cold War, or the passing of a
particular period of post-war history, but the end of history as such:
that is, the end point of mankinds ideological evolution and the
universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human
government. This is not to say that there will no longer be events to
fill the pages of Foreign Affairss yearly summaries
of international relations, for the victory of liberalism has occurred
primarily in the realm of ideas or consciousness and is as yet incomplete
in the real or material world. But there are powerful reasons for believing
that it is the ideal that will govern the material world in the long run.

An
Explosion of Green (Apr. 1995)By Bill McKibben in The Atlantic
In the early nineteenth century the cleric Timothy Dwight reported
that the 240-mile journey from Boston to New York City passed through
no more than twenty miles of forest. Surveying the changes wrought by
farmers and loggers in New Hampshire, he wrote, The forests are
not only cut down, but there appears little reason to hope that they will
ever grow again. Less than two centuries later, despite great increases
in the states population, 90 percent of New Hampshire is covered
by forest. Vermont was 35 percent woods in 1850 and is 80 percent today,
and even Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Rhode Island have seen woodlands
rebound to the point where they cover nearly three fifths of southern
New England. This process, which began as farmers abandoned the cold and
rocky pastures of the East for the fertile fields of the Midwest, has
not yet run its course.... This unintentional and mostly unnoticed renewal
of the rural and mountainous East  not the spotted owl, not the
salvation of Alaskas pristine ranges  represents the great
environmental story of the United States, and in some ways of the whole
world. Here, where suburb and megalopolis were
added to the worlds vocabulary, an explosion of green is under way,
one that could offer hope to much of the rest of the planet.

The
Doomslayer (Feb. 1997)By Ed Regis in Wired
The world is getting progressively poorer, and its all because
of population, or more precisely, overpopulation. Theres
a finite store of resources on our pale blue dot, spaceship Earth, our
small and fragile tiny planet, and were fast approaching its ultimate
carrying capacity. The limits to growth are finally upon us, and were
living on borrowed time. The laws of population growth are inexorable.
Unless we act decisively, the final result is written in stone: mass poverty,
famine, starvation, and death. Time is short, and we have to act now.
Thats the standard and canonical litany.... Theres just one
problem with The Litany, just one slight little wee imperfection: every
item in that dim and dreary recitation, each and every last claim, is
false.... Thus saith The Doomslayer, one Julian
L. Simon, a neither shy nor retiring nor particularly mild-mannered
professor of business administration at a middling eastern-seaboard state
university. Simon paints a somewhat different picture of the human condition
circa 1997. Our species is better off in just about every measurable
material way, he says. Just about every important long-run
measure of human material welfare shows improvement over the decades and
centuries, in the United States and the rest of the world. Raw materials
 all of them  have become less scarce rather than more. The
air in the US and in other rich countries is irrefutably safer to breathe.
Water cleanliness has improved. The environment is increasingly healthy,
with every prospect that this trend will continue.

A brilliant parody:

Transgressing
the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity
(Spring/Summer 1996)By Alan Sokal in Social Text
There are many natural scientists, and especially physicists, who
continue to reject the notion that the disciplines concerned with social
and cultural criticism can have anything to contribute, except perhaps
peripherally, to their research. Still less are they receptive to the
idea that the very foundations of their worldview must be revised or rebuilt
in the light of such criticism. Rather, they cling to the dogma imposed
by the long post-Enlightenment hegemony over the Western intellectual
outlook, which can be summarized briefly as follows: that there exists
an external world, whose properties are independent of any individual
human being and indeed of humanity as a whole; that these properties are
encoded in eternal physical laws; and that human beings can
obtain reliable, albeit imperfect and tentative, knowledge of these laws
by hewing to the objective procedures and epistemological
strictures prescribed by the (so-called) scientific method.

... and, in explanation, ...

A
Physicist Experiments with Cultural Studies (May/June 1996)By Alan Sokal in Lingua Franca
For some years Ive been troubled by an apparent decline in
the standards of rigor in certain precincts of the academic humanities.
But Im a mere physicist: If I find myself unable to make heads or
tails of jouissance and differance, perhaps that just reflects
my own inadequacy. So, to test the prevailing intellectual standards,
I decided to try a modest (though admittedly uncontrolled) experiment:
Would a leading North American journal of cultural studies  whose
editorial collective includes such luminaries as Fredric Jameson and Andrew
Ross  publish an article liberally salted with nonsense if (a) it
sounded good and (b) it flattered the editors ideological preconceptions?
The answer, unfortunately, is yes.... Whats going on here? Could
the editors really not have realized that my article was written as a
parody?

Networks
Need a Reality Check: A firsthand account of liberal bias at CBS News.
(02/13/1996)By Bernard Goldbert in The Wall Street Journal
There are lots of reasons fewer people are watching network news,
and one of them, Im more convinced than ever, is that our viewers
simply dont trust us. And for good reason. The old argument that
the networks and other media elites have a liberal bias is
so blatantly true that its hardly worth discussing anymore. No,
we dont sit around in dark corners and plan strategies on how were
going to slant the news. We dont have to. It comes naturally to
most reporters.

There
is No Time, There Will Be Time (11/18/1998)By Peggy Noonan in Forbes ASAP
When you consider who is gifted and crazed with rage... when you
think of the terrorist places and the terrorist countries... who do they
hate most? The Great Satan, the United States. What is its most important
place? Some would say Washington. I would say the great city of the United
States is the great city of the world, the dense 10-mile-long island called
Manhattan, where the economic and media power of the nation resides, the
city that is the psychological center of our modernity, our hedonism,
our creativity, our hard-shouldered hipness, our unthinking arrogance.

The
1911 Edition Encyclopedia Britannica
This 1911 edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica is filled with
historical information that is still relevant today. It fills 29 volumes
and contains over 44 million words. The articles are written by more than
1500 authors within their various fields of expertise.

The
September 11 Web Archive
This collection of archived documents was commissioned by the Library
of Congress to preserve digital materials covering the events of September
11, 2001.

US
Election 2000
This collection was commissioned by the Library of Congress to archive
digital materials covering the Election of 2000. It contains 800 gigabytes
of data gathered from 8/1/2000 to 1/21/2001.

A chronicle of high-level USA government actions
in September 2001, at two websites:

Ten
Days in September (WP)
This series is based on interviews with President Bush, Vice President
Cheney and many other key officials inside the administration and out.
The interviews were supplemented by notes of National Security Council
meetings made available to The Washington Post, along with notes taken
by several participants.

HTI
American Verse Project
The American Verse Project is a collaborative project between the
University of Michigan Humanities Text Initiative (HTI) and the University
of Michigan Press. The project is assembling an electronic archive of
volumes of American poetry prior to 1920.

What
We Think of America (Granta)
In this issue twenty-four writers drawn from many countries describe
the part America has played in their lives  for better or worse
 and deliver their estimate of the good and the bad it has done
as the worlds supreme political, military, economic and cultural
power.

A
Trust Betrayed:
Sexual Abuse by Teachers (Education Week)
This three-part series on child sex abuse by school employees is
the result of a six-month project by Education Week involving scores of
interviews with state and local education and law-enforcement officials,
other experts, teachers, principals, parents, and victims, as well as
an extensive review of court documents, journal articles, and public-policy
records.

The
Crusades (Catholic Dossier)
It is difficult for one who lives in an increasingly secularized
society not to be influenced by its prejudices. One of the great misunderstandings
in the West, even among Catholics, has to do with the Crusades. This issue
of Catholic Dossier provides fundamental and irrefutable historical
information about what actually happened and why.

Pope
Pius XII (Catholic Dossier)
The accomplishments of the Vatican diplomatic corps in the various
countries occupied by the Germans, over which the sinister Eichmann preyed,
had received the plaudits of all free men, not least those in the new
country of Israel. There groves were planted in honor of the Pope and
of many of his nuncios, not least Cardinal Roncalli who, as nuncio in
Istanbul, had been the good right arm of Pius in rescuing Jews. Pius XII
escaped martyrdom during his lifetime, but he has been subjected to the
martyrdom of vilification, defamation and incredible falsification after
his death.

The
New Rise of Islam (Catholic World Report)
Late in the 20th century, the renewed vigor of Islam has become
one of the most important developments on the world scene. By dint of
their energetic proselytism, their migration to new lands, and their high
birth rate, Muslims are rapidly gaining attention and influence in many
countries where their faith has heretofore been virtually unknown. CWR
aims to make readers better acquainted with Islam, with a primer on the
religious principles, and public practices of that faith.

Christianity
and Islam, Terrorism and War (Catholic World Report)
Why have thousands of Muslims joined in anti-American protests in
Pakistan, Kenya, and Indonesia since the start of the US air strikes on
terrorist bases in Afghanistan? These demonstrators are not all supporters
of al-Qaeda, thirsting for American blood; they are not Arabs, caught
up in the political turmoil of the Middle East. They are united only by
the Muslim faith. Is it Islam, then, that prods them toward violence?

The
Cross and the Crescent (Catholic World Report)
To a remarkable degree, America has united behind President Bush
in the war on terrorism. For the first time since World War II there is
an overwhelming consensus that we are fighting a necessary battle, for
a just cause. That national unity is a clear sign of strength, and a clear
warning to our enemies. Nevertheless, beneath the surface of that consensus
the careful observer can still detect signs of the fault lines within
American society. We are united against terrorists, but divided among
ourselves.

OxBlog
The political rantings of Josh Chafetz, a graduate student in political
theory at Oxford, Dan Urman, a graduate student in international relations
at Oxford, and Anand Giridharadas, a junior at the University of Michigan
spending the year at Oxford.

Joe Klein is writing a multi-part report from
Europe for The Guardian:

newFrance?
Its like 1970s America (05/28/02)
Over the next six weeks, Joe Klein, Americas leading political
commentator, will be travelling through Europe for the Guardian. Today,
36 years after he first arrived there in search of dark-eyed lovelies
with difficult personalities, he reports from France

newThe
Prince (06/06/02)
Is Silvio Berlusconi a medieval thowback to a time when rich men
could buy power? Or the shape of things to come? And is he dangerous 
or just a colourful rogue? In the second of his weekly dispatches from
Europe, Joe Klein meets the billionaire prime minister who just wants
to be loved

The Problem of Sexual Molestation by Roman Catholic
Clergy: Meeting the Problem in a Comprehensive and Responsible Manner
(the 1985 report to American Bishops):

Second
Part
Summary of Considerations (cont.), Project Proposal, Scope of Services,
Strategy, Conclusion

Related articles in The New York Times on the
last messages to come out of the World Trade Center after the first plane
struck:

History
Recorded From the Messages of Victims (05/26/02)
The primary sources for todays article are interviews with
more than 140 people who communicated with individuals on the upper floors
of the twin towers, and conversations with 17 others who were at or above
the impact zone in the south tower but escaped. Additionally, eight people
described conditions just below the impact zone in the north tower.

102
Minutes: Fighting to Live as the Towers Died (05/26/02)
They began as calls for help, information, guidance. They quickly
turned into soundings of desperation, and anger, and love. Now they are
the remembered voices of the men and women who were trapped on the high
floors of the twin towers. From their last words, a haunting chronicle
of the final 102 minutes at the World Trade Center has emerged, built
on scores of phone conversations and e-mail and voice messages. These
accounts, along with the testimony of the handful of people who escaped,
provide the first sweeping views from the floors directly hit by the airplanes
and above. Collected by reporters for The New York Times, these last words
give human form to an all but invisible strand of this stark, public catastrophe:
the advancing destruction across the top 19 floors of the north tower
and the top 33 of the south, where loss of life was most severe on Sept.
11. Of the 2,823 believed dead in the attack on New York, at least 1,946,
or 69 percent, were killed on those upper floors, an analysis by The Times
has found.

Accounts
From the North Tower (05/26/02)
Following are accounts from survivors of the attack on the World
Trade Centers North Tower and the friends and relatives of the victims.

Accounts
From the South Tower (05/26/02)
Following are accounts from survivors of the attack on the World
Trade Centers South Tower and the friends and relatives of the victims.

A three-part UPI series by Martin Sieff on how
some mainstream media were bamboozled about a massacre that had never
happened:

Part
One: Documenting the Myth (05/20/02)
After the Israeli Army attacked the West Bank Palestinian city of
Jenin on April 2, the Western European media fell for the Massacre
Myth in Jenin in a big way. Even though the final Palestinian Authority
figure acknowledged only 56 dead in Jenin, media coverage in major Western
European nations gave credence to early claims by the PAs top officials
that as many as 3,000 civilians had been killed in the fighting there.
Israels own actions led credence to the myth. The Israeli army barred
the international media from Jenin as its forces drove into the city.
The only sources that the media then had for what was going on there were
from the Palestinians themselves. And in the inevitable confusion of battle,
what the great 19th century military theoretician Carl von Clausewitz
called the fog of war applied. At the time, both the Israeli
and Palestinian authorities appeared unclear what was actually happening
on the ground. However, even allowing for these factors, the Western media
coverage of Jenin, espically in the Western European press and broadcast
media, largely proved to be factually wildly inaccurate in the light of
what later emerged. And there was also a hysterical tone to many of them.
What made these unreliable and misleading reports all the more remarkable
was that many of the worst of them emerged in the most respected and influential
organizations in the British media. The British Broadcasting Corporation
and three of the four so-called quality daily newspapers 
The Times, The Independent and The Guardian  fell for the Massacre
Myth hook, line and sinker. Even the more cautious and  as
it proved  reliable Daily Telegraph was not entirely
immune either.

Analysis:
Why Europeans bought Jenin myth (05/21/02)
Why were reporters and news editors of so many of the biggest and
most prestigious Western European newspapers and broadcasting networks
ready to believe that the Israeli Army had committed a massacre in the
Palestinian West Bank city of Jenin when no massacre had in fact occurred?
The reasons were many. First, everyone was prepared to believe the worst,
because the worst had already happened. It was all too credible to believe
that hundreds, if not thousands, of Palestinians had been massacred in
Jenin because they had been massacred before. The 20-year-old shadow of
Sabra and Shatila lay across the international medias initial perceptions
of Jenin.... Second, the Israelis haplessly and inadvertently dug a public
relations trap for themselves and then promptly fell into it. They prevented
the international media from covering what was certainly extremely fierce
fighting in the refugee camp and streets of Jenin.... Third, even when
the worst fighting was over and the Israelis finally allowed reporters
into Jenin, a rat pack psychology, even hysteria, appears
to have taken hold. People saw what they wanted to see and they mutually
reinforced each other in their perceptions.... Fourth, almost none of
those present had covered serious urban conflicts in Lebanon and Northern
Ireland during their worst phases in the 1970s and early 1980s. Almost
none of them were old enough to have experienced full-scale battle reporting
first-hand in Vietnam. This led them to vastly exaggerate the scale of
destruction and death they were seeing.

How
Europes media lost out (05/22/02)
The credibility of state-run or supported national broadcasting
organizations took a huge hit. The principle of having a free market in
broadcasting as well as print media outlets in order to ensure more fair
and balanced overall coverage got a big boost. This was humiliating to
the Europeans, who have long sneered in their dominant broadcast media
culture at what they regard as the crass commercialism and vulgar pursuit
of profits of competing U.S. broadcasting networks. It was also a blow
to those who would like to expand National Public Radios small-scale
radio news operation in the United States into a radio-TV news empire
on the lines of the BBC or other European outlets. The reporters and editors
of NPR appeared far more prone to swallow the wild allegations about Jenin
than most of their U.S. media colleagues did. The controversy also underlined
the value of having widely read and circulated columnists who can act
in the media like the Senate does in Congress or other upper
houses of parliament do in Western Europe and Japan. Such columnists at
their best can act like deliberative parliamentary chambers not subject
to the pressures of repeated re-election campaigns. They can take a longer
term view of things. They can act as cautious, more thoughtful voices
expressing caution or doubt about emotional hysteria sweeping the news
pages. William F. Buckleys May 4 editorial Did the Israelis
Do It? serves as a model for this kind of writing.

On
the Prosing of Poetry
Before writing was invented, poetry was used to mark special occasions
and strong emotions and to burn the necessary stories  the myths
and truths of a culture  into the memories of the people. Mnemonic
devices such as sound, rhythm, and heightened, pictorial language, economy
of expression (epigrammatic speech that encodes many meanings
in as few words as possible) and assonance, consonance, alliteration,
parallelism, were the branding irons used for the task. As well, these
devices were incantatory, stirring primal responses to their sound and
rhythm, and creating an atmosphere for the sacred and magical. Although
spoken, poetry was not common; it was instead, a singular kind of speech,
reserved for relaying important or sacred events, ensuring that such events
would be remembered almost in a physical way, in the bodys deep
response to sound, rhythm and imagery. Speaking poetically served a purpose.
Speaking prosaically also served a purpose  to negotiate everyday
reality, to speak of those things which were common to all and not worthy
of long remembrance  to speak of the world in transit. Our ability
to write did not erase the distinction. It took contemporary American
poets, writing in deliberately flat prose about insignificant personal
events and feelings; and editors, publishers and critics dubbing such
anecdotes and everyday journal entries poems, to erase the
distinction. We have reached the point we are being asked to believe that
a text block, chopped randomly into flat, declarative lines, is a poem.
We are told to kneel and stare at this specimen of dead lines laid out
in its little coffin on the page, and declare it alive. What do we say?

I=N=C=O=H=
E=R=E=N=T
The need for coherence appears to be basic, perhaps even neurological.
Science has proved the human brain strives to find a pattern, an order,
a meaning in chaos. What isnt coherent, we strive to make so. It
satisfies us. Thus, before settling for separate, unconnected pieces,
beautiful as they may be, we will look hard for connections. While shapes
and colors can become untethered from their representation, or meaning,
a poem can only become fully untethered from meaning if it is without
words. This is because the smallest irreducible piece  the word
 retains meaning, in and out of context. A totally meaningless poem
would logically consist of a blank page. In spite of this difficulty,
some poets do manage to make extremely close approaches to the state of
meaninglessness while still using words.... In order to save us from the
Western capitalist construction called a poem, the Language Poets had
to destroy it. But two other possible reasons for writing Language Poetry
come to mind: [1] The poet cannot succesfully create a coherent poem and
so makes a virtue of his failure. [2] The poet cannot successfully create
a coherent poem and so uses poem-as-pretext for expounding critical theories
 something he or she can do, and that, happy coincidence, ensures
an academic career.

The
Argument for Silence: Defining the Poet Peter Principle
The tension between career and vocation
in poetry is nowhere more obvious than in academia where poets take a
sabbatical in order to write poetry, but never take a sabbatical
from writing poetry. I believe that a certain variety of established
poet, perhaps those with a substantial number of books, would benefit
greatly from a poetry sabbatical. There is evidence of a need for poetic
silence all around us. We see it every time we read a denatured poem by
a renowned poet, usually in a renowned publication; evidence that the
enabling editors of such publications have failed in their duty to enforce
last call. For example, poets James Tate, Philip Levine and Mary Oliver
have each produced more than 16 books of poetry. Whatever has driven this
production, it is clear from the trajectory of all three poets that something
must stop it. In all three cases, a windiness, a wordiness, a kind of
poetic logorrhea can be found in their latest work in contrast to the
fire and compression in their early work. Flatlined, barely pulsing, their
latest work is being kept alive by extraordinary means: the artificial
resuscitation of continuous publication.

Common
Sense and Sensibility (03/28/02)
Economists are not well thought of these days by environmentalists.
Or so it seems from accounts such as a recent Scientific American excerpt
of Edward O. Wilsons book, The Future of Life. He characterizes
economists as narrow, myopic environmental ignoramuses.... Its true
that economists have trouble with the views of many environmentalists.
But this just reflects our frustration with the ecologists use of
the most naive and inappropriate economic models and assumptions in their
forecasts and policy prescriptions. Thats why Bjorn Lomborgs
new book The Skeptical Environmentalist is such a distinctive,
rare, and important work. In addition to sharing the ecologists
concerns about aquifers, sustainability, and global warming, Lomborg accepts
the economists paradigm. By combining economics with ecology, he
comes up with a rational, balanced analysis. Unfortunately, environmentalists
denial of the validity of economic analysis runs through much of their
criticism of Lomborgs work.... Environmentalists tend to assume
a constant relationship between inputs and outputs. If you are going to
produce X tons of grain, then the acreage of land required will be X/y,
where y is the average yield of an acre of land. Economists call this
the fixed-coefficients model, because the relationship between
acreage and grain is governed by the coefficient y. Simply put, this is
not a realistic model. In practice there are always a variety of production
techniques that use different combinations of inputs to produce the same
output. The fixed-coefficients model applies, if at all, only in the very
short run. In the long run, there is substitution and technical change.
Substitution means that producers will vary the inputs used in production,
depending on changes in the cost of various inputs. For example, if land
becomes more expensive, producers will substitute capital, labor, fertilizer,
or other resources in order to utilize the most efficient combination.
The other long-run factor is technical change. As we accumulate knowledge,
we come up with ways to produce more output with fewer resources.

Lomborgs
Lessons (04/02/02)
Economists use interest rates to discount future benefits and costs.
Because of discounting, environmental costs that are out in the future
are given less weight than todays economic goods, including todays
environment. Ecologists suspect that economists are being short-sighted,
when in fact we are being rational. The interest rate represents the price
at which the economy can trade off future output for present output. What
discounting says is that tomorrows output is cheap in
todays terms. Undertaking a large expense today to avoid the same
expense tomorrow is inefficient. Ecologists worry that we are consuming
too much now, while depriving future generations of resources and leaving
them with large unpaid environmental bills. Economists, on the other hand,
argue that by investing in science and research we are providing a legacy
of wealth to future generations. The assets that they inherit in the form
of capital and know-how will be much greater than any environmental liabilities.
In The Skeptical Environmentalist, Bjorn Lomborg makes a
strong case against the Kyoto Protocol, which attempts to restrict carbon
dioxide emissions in order to forestall global warming. Even as one who
accepts the thesis of global warming, Lomborg suggests that the Kyoto
Protocol is a bad idea. Lomborg estimates a finite (albeit large) cost
to global warming. Also, because this cost will be borne in the future,
he applies a discount rate. If the present value of the cost of global
warming is finite, then it becomes possible to estimate the benefits of
policies to forestall global warming. Next, it follows that we can compare
benefits to costs. It is on the basis of these cost-benefit comparisons
that Lomborg is able to show that the Kyoto Protocol approach is unwise.

The
book of the century (06/04/02)
Its unwise to read The Lord of the Rings as allegory
in any strict sense, but this commonplace personal odyssey, one shared
by millions in the modern age, is strikingly echoed in its plot. Frodo,
the child-size hero, must leave his beloved Shire and travel into Saurons
domain of Mordor, with its slag heaps, its permanent pall of smoke, its
slave-driven industries. When he returns after much danger and difficulty,
he discovers that the malicious wizard Saruman  as Shippey points
out, a techno-Utopian who began with good intentions  has industrialized
the Shire itself, cutting down its trees, replacing its hobbit-holes with
brick slums and factories and poisoning its rivers. In this regard, then,
The Lord of the Rings belongs to the literature of the Industrial
Revolution, a lament for the destruction of Englands green
and pleasant land that belongs somewhere on the same shelf with
Thomas Hardy, D.H. Lawrence and William Blake. But Tolkien saw something
wilder and stranger in the Sarehole of his childhood, and in himself:
a fading but still tangible connection to the distant, mythic past. If
his Shire hobbits are the West Midlands rural bourgeoisie of 1895 or so,
they have been catapulted backward into a world where they themselves
are the anachronisms, a realm of elves, dwarves (Tolkien insisted on this
nonstandard but ancient plural, although he would have preferred dwarrows),
wizards, dragons, goblins and black sorcerers.

A
curiously very great book (06/05/02)
It is not merely the scale of mythic invention or the grand storytelling
that distinguishes it but also its tragic vision, the profound melancholy
mentioned by Lewis. Few if any heroic quests have ever had such a sense
of human frailty and weakness; although Frodo brings the Ring all the
way to the Cracks of Doom where Sauron forged it, in the end he is overcome
by temptation and claims it for his own. He is redeemed only by chance,
or by divine grace, which in Tolkiens world comes to the same thing.
He has shown mercy to the treacherous and miserable Gollum, who becomes
the accidental agent of Frodos and the worlds salvation. But
Frodo, the books ostensible hero, fails in his quest and is left,
like the knight who guards the Holy Grail, with a grievous wound that
can never heal (an Arthurian parallel Shippey has not noticed). Even the
victory wrought by the Rings destruction is a sad affair, in many
respects closer to defeat. Much of the magic and mystery drains out of
Middle-earth after Saurons fall, leaving behind an ordinary, only
slightly prehistoric realm dominated by human beings. Tolkiens most
beloved characters  Gandalf, the High-Elves Elrond and Galadriel
and the hobbits Bilbo and Frodo, both of them indelibly marked by the
Ring  depart over the western seas to a paradisiacal nowhere that
none of us on this shore will ever see. Tolkien liked to present himself
to friends and readers as a contented fireside hobbit, fond of tobacco,
simple food and late mornings in bed, and there can be no doubt, reading
his letters, that he was immensely gratified by the outpouring of love
and enthusiasm his work engendered. (And immensely irritated by some of
it; when a woman wanted to name her Siamese cats after his characters,
he replied that they were the fauna of Mordor.) But in reality
he was a strange and complicated man who wrote a strange and sad book,
whose complex of meanings we will likely never determine.

A three-part article on some current thinking
on the Koran in The Atlantic:

What
is the Koran? Part 1 (Jan. 1999)
Some of the parchment pages in the Yemeni hoard seemed to date back
to the seventh and eighth centuries A.D., or Islams first two centuries
 they were fragments, in other words, of perhaps the oldest Korans
in existence. Whats more, some of these fragments revealed small
but intriguing aberrations from the standard Koranic text. Such aberrations,
though not surprising to textual historians, are troublingly at odds with
the orthodox Muslim belief that the Koran as it has reached us today is
quite simply the perfect, timeless, and unchanging Word of God.

What
is the Koran? Part 2 (Jan. 1999)
Deviating from the orthodox interpretation of the Koran, says the
Algerian Mohammed Arkoun, a professor emeritus of Islamic thought at the
University of Paris, is a very sensitive business
with major implications. Millions and millions of people refer to
the Koran daily to explain their actions and to justify their aspirations,
Arkoun says. This scale of reference is much larger than it has
ever been before.

What
is the Koran? Part 3 (Jan. 1999)
Gerd-R. Puin speaks with disdain about the traditional willingness,
on the part of Muslim and Western scholars, to accept the conventional
understanding of the Koran. The Koran claims for itself that it
is mubeen, or clear, he says. But
if you look at it, you will notice that every fifth sentence or so simply
doesnt make sense. Many Muslims  and Orientalists  will
tell you otherwise, of course, but the fact is that a fifth of the Koranic
text is just incomprehensible. This is what has caused the traditional
anxiety regarding translation. If the Koran is not comprehensible 
if it cant even be understood in Arabic  then its not
translatable. People fear that. And since the Koran claims repeatedly
to be clear but obviously is not  as even speakers of Arabic will
tell you  there is a contradiction. Something else must be going
on.